


Blood on His Hands

by Spaceboylouis



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Gun Violence, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, One Shot, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker Whump, Stabbing, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:54:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25438780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spaceboylouis/pseuds/Spaceboylouis
Summary: Peter's crumbling under the pressure of feeling like he has the responsibility to stop every single bad thing from happening, especially when he fails to stop someone from getting badly hurt. Luckily, Mr. Stark's there to help.
Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 8
Kudos: 70





	Blood on His Hands

Peter knew that he shouldn’t be patrolling. Technically, he still had an hour before his weekend midnight curfew, which he knew wouldn’t even be strictly enforced because he was spending the weekend at the tower rather than his apartment and Mr. Stark wasn’t quite comfortable disciplining him yet unless he did something seriously wrong. However, the Saturday night before finals week would’ve been much more productively spent studying for history considering all the times he’d skipped that class to swing around the city fighting crime. 

Even just getting a good night’s sleep would’ve been more beneficial to his grades, but lately every time he closed his eyes, the noises of the city sharpened and each sound seemed to him like another crime he could’ve stopped, another person he could’ve saved. _These things are happening because of you_ , a voice in his head would say, _because you did nothing to stop them_. And so he patrolled more than ever, coming back before curfew to keep Aunt May from grounding him, then sneaking back out once he heard her breaths slow in the other room, proving she was asleep. He was exhausted all the time, but he couldn’t stop.

“Karen, you got anything else for me?” Peter asked as he swung away from the apartment of the drunk girl he’d walked home.

“There seems to be a mugging taking place in an alley approximately one thousand feet north of your current location.”

“I’m on it,” Peter replied, swinging his way north until he heard the commotion.

Landing on the top of the building bordering the alley, he looked down and saw three men, two with guns and one with a knife, cornering a college-aged woman who was trying to speak but was unintelligible through her tears.

“This fight is a little unevenly matched, even by my standards,” he shouted down at them from four stories above.

The men turned as he let himself down with a web, pointing their weapons at him instead.

“Can’t you guys rob big corporations at least? What did she ever do to you?” he said, assuming a fighting stance.

The robbers didn’t respond, which Peter privately thought was a little rude, even if it was in character for a bad guy. Instead of voicing this, he aimed webs at both of the guns at once and tugged, sending them clattering onto the pavement behind him. Knife guy dropped back, but Peter didn’t pay him too much attention because he knew the only way out of the alley was past him, and his spidey sense would alert him if knife guy got too close. Besides, the artists formerly known as gun guys one and two didn’t seem to mind being unarmed and they kept advancing, which demanded most of his focus. 

Gun guy one threw a punch that Peter easily caught before it made contact with his face, using his grip on gun guy one’s fist to throw him backwards towards the wall. Gun guy two held off a little, looking over Peter’s shoulder at the guns before trying to run for them, but Peter placed a hand in the center of his chest and pushed him back. Meanwhile, gun guy one was on his way back over and gun guy two seemed angrier than ever.

“As much as I’d love to end my Saturday night with a fistfight, I actually have a lot to do after this,” Peter said as he webbed gun guy one up to the wall on his left and ducked under a punch from gun guy two.

“I do respect the effort though, I can’t be proud of myself if you make it too easy,” he said, webbing up gun guy two to the wall on his right, “Although I guess I wasn’t gonna be proud of myself anyway.”

Knife guy seemed to have ditched the weapon and gained a purse as he tried to scale one of the buildings to get away.

“Hey, I’m pretty sure climbing the walls is my thing,” Peter said, webbing him in place, knife guy’s face squishing up against a window.

With the last of the muggers webbed up and the sound of police sirens in the distance, Peter aimed a web at a nearby building to begin his swing home for the night, thinking he’d saved enough people to study a little while with a clear conscience and actually get some sleep, especially since he’d been so efficient in stopping these guys.

“Spider-man?”

He whipped his head around at the whisper and his arm hung in the air, forgotten, as he took in the sight in the alley.

Peter always checked up on victims before he left. Every single time. This entire vigilante business was born out of a desire to help people, to keep the community safe. Yet somehow, he hadn’t noticed that the girl he’d “saved” was sitting up against the grimy bricks, her breaths labored as she tried to staunch the flow of blood from her side with shaking hands.

Despite the warmth of the night, goosebumps prickled over Peter’s entire body as his mind went momentarily blank before the avalanche of guilt hit.

He nearly tripped over himself in his rush to get to her and he ignored the pain in his knees as he dropped to her side more harshly than he’d intended.

“Can I get a look at it?” he asked, unsure if she’d even hear him with how quiet it came out.

She lifted her hands and he suddenly realized what knife guy had been doing as he’d confronted the other two. The stab wound was deep enough that Peter knew from experience the girl would probably need surgery, and the fact that the knife was no longer in her meant that she was losing a considerable amount of blood. It tye-dyed her white shirt in the worst possible way and glittered on the pavement in a way that would probably ruin rainy days for Peter for the rest of his life. He placed both his hands on the gash, knowing that he’d be able to keep more pressure on it than she would in her state of shock.

“Karen, is there an ambulance on the way?”

“911 has only dispatched police to respond to this incident. It would take an ambulance approximately twenty minutes to reach your location and an estimated thirty minutes to reach a hospital given current traffic patterns. Would you like me to place a call?” Karen responded.

Peter swore under his breath.

“Am I going to die?” the girl whispered.

He finally tore his eyes off her wounded side to look at her face, and he almost wished he hadn’t. Her hair was sticking to the sweat on her forehead and cheeks even though she was shivering and her bottom lip was bleeding and a bruise was forming around her right eye. If this evidence of her physical pain wasn’t hard enough to witness, she was also looking at him with unshed tears in her eyes that held an unmistakable mixture of terror and hurt. _You caused this_ , his mind told him, _it’s your fault_.

“You’re gonna be fine,” he said, carefully keeping his voice from breaking “I promise.”

He took his hands off the wound and quickly used a web to stop the bleeding like he’d done with his own injuries countless times.

“Is it alright if I pick you up?” he asked.

She nodded, and as gently as he could, he picked her up bridal style and began walking toward the opening of the alley.

“I would not recommend swinging to the hospital with her as the movement could cause additional internal damage,” Karen said in his ear.

He nodded to Karen and said to the woman, “The closest hospital is only a couple miles away, so I’m gonna carry you there. Let me know if I’m making anything more painful.”

Her eyes were squeezed shut and her jaw was clenched against the pain, but she nodded into his chest. Looking down at her, Peter thought she looked like a little kid like this, even though she must’ve been at least five years older than him. 

He started to run. Every part of his brain that wasn’t working to get him to where he needed to be without tripping over anything was focusing on keeping his upper body from moving so he wouldn’t jostle her as he sprinted to the hospital at superhuman speed. Usually that kind of speed was only for very short distances, but he ignored the burn in his lungs and the stitch in his side as the city passed by him in a blur.

If he expected the world to come back into focus when he reached the emergency room and stopped running, he was sorely mistaken. The gurneys and web-dissolving fluid and rushed explanations of the injury passed by like he was underwater, which was fitting because he never quite got his breath back from his run. It was like drowning, even after they had taken the girl into surgery and he sat in the plastic chair in the waiting room that squeaked every time he shifted. He barely noticed the stares of the other patients who had all paused while filling out their forms to watch as a superhero came in.

_Your fault your fault your fault_ repeated over and over in his mind as he made the decision to sit in that waiting room until he could see with his own eyes that she was alright. He found that he was grateful for his mask not only for hiding his identity but also because he knew no one would be able to see the tears he was silently shedding.

The crowd around him changed as patients were called in by nurses and new patients arrived who stared like they’d never seen a vigilante do something so normal as wait in a waiting room, and still Peter sat, still as stone. His eyes were trained on the blood on his hands, unseeing as he breathed the antiseptic air and replayed the night in his mind over and over. 

Picking out everything he’d done wrong, he lingered on the moment when he’d almost left the girl to die so he could go read about Napoleon and the minutes he’d let a man he knew to have a knife out of his sight long enough to kill someone. He let the memories rip at his chest.

When he’d thoroughly dissected the night, he thought of every time he’d relaxed, watched a TV show, stayed after school for a club, or slept in for an extra hour, and counted all the other girls he’d left bleeding on the pavement alone because he had been so focused on himself. His breath came in even shorter. He thought about the girl’s watery eyes and imagined them in the background of every carefree moment he’d had since the bite, haunting him, tainting his every happy memory with the guilt that maybe someone else had died because of him.

_Your fault your fault your fault._

He didn’t notice when the stares shifted from him to the door or that the chatter in the waiting room had turned to gasps. He didn’t notice as someone sat down next to him in the chair that the other patients had been too nervous to occupy. He only looked up when a familiar hand fell onto his shoulder in a comforting gesture he’d recently come to know.

“Hey, kid,” Mr. Stark said softly, “what do you say we get out of here and go to bed?”

Despite the way his body was screaming for rest, the thought of leaving made him physically ill.

“I can’t,” Peter rasped, “not until I know she’s okay, not while I know it’s my fault.”

Mr. Stark regarded him for a moment, looking into the eyes of the mask like they might give him the answers he was looking for.

“Okay, you wanna tell me what happened tonight?”

As Peter launched into the story of the mugging and his negligence in his hurry to get home, he thanked god for the second time that night for his mask. He really didn’t want to look Mr. Stark in the eye while he told him, the superhero he looked up to the most, how much of a failure he was as he cried. When he finally looked up, the disappointment and anger he’d expected to find were nowhere on his mentor’s face.

“What I’m hearing is that you saved her life, bambino,” he said.

“I should’ve done more,” Peter said, “I should’ve stopped her from getting hurt. I should’ve _noticed_ her getting hurt. I shouldn’t have even been thinking of going home early just to study and sleep when I _knew_ there were more people who needed me.”

Mr. Stark smiled sadly and said, “You can’t dedicate 100% of your time to being Spider-Man. You need some time to be a regular person and prioritize your own life.”

“But, Mr. Stark, When you can do the things that I can, but you don't and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you. If I’m not patrolling and I could be, every mugging, every kidnapping, every assault is _my fault_. How am I supposed to call myself a superhero when I let things like this happen?” he said, trailing off into a whisper.

“Hey, you’re the best superhero I’ve ever met, kid,” Mr. Stark said, “You gotta remember that you’re not the only person trying to keep New York safe and you gotta remember that _none_ of the awful things you’ve seen or stopped or haven’t been able to stop have been your fault. You could never patrol again in your life and none of these crimes would be your fault because the only people responsible are the criminals.”

Mr. Stark spoke with so much conviction that Peter wanted to believe him, and he found himself nodding along even though it went against his previous views of himself and his responsibility. He felt a little lighter with the reassurance.

Mr. Stark didn’t wait for a verbal reply before he continued, “You’ve done so much good in this world already, bambino, and I’m so proud of you. I’d be proud of you if you quit the superhero business right now and I’d be proud of you if you were Spider-Man until you were ninety years old. I’ve never met anyone as morally good as you are, and I don’t think I ever will, so don’t you ever feel like you’re not good enough.”

“Okay,” Peter choked out, tears still dampening his mask but for a different reason this time.

He wanted to say more, but the words stuck in his throat. He knew that very few people in the world got to see Tony Stark like this, and he couldn’t believe he was one of them. At the same time, the realization that Mr. Stark would never put himself through the ordeal of showing emotion without really meaning it crashed over him, and he knew that nothing he’d said was just a lie to make Peter feel better.

“Tomorrow we’ll talk about splitting time between you and Spider-Man better, because I’m not letting my kid be anything less than a top priority, capisce?”

“Okay. Mr. Stark, thank you, I-” 

“Don’t mention it, kid,” Mr. Stark waved him off.

Peter looked at him, the fluorescent ceiling light behind him almost looking like a halo, and he could feel the love coming off of him in waves, betraying his casual facade. It replaced a little of the crushing guilt that had made its home in Peter’s chest.

“Can we still stay until she’s better?” Peter asked.

“Of course,” Mr. Stark said, “Get some rest; I’ll wake you up when she’s allowed visitors.”

Peter’s head dropped to Mr. Stark’s shoulder almost on its own, and soon he was drifting off.

Sunlight was peeking through the blinds when Peter finally stepped into the girl’s room, where she sat, tucked under the sterile smelling sheets and looking tired but leagues better than she had the night before. She started crying when she saw Peter, and Mr. Stark stepped out to give them some privacy with the excuse of paying off her hospital bills.

Peter learned that her name was Josey and she’d been walking home from celebrating a friend’s twenty-first birthday at a bar when she was attacked.

“I can’t thank you enough,” she said, “You’ve done more than I ever could’ve expected, even from a hero. You stopped those guys, you saved my life, and you’ve been so nice to me this whole time. I can’t believe you carried me here and waited here all night. I’m glad there are people like you in the world.”

She had chipped away another little piece of Peter’s guilt.

He hugged her as they said goodbye, and if he cried into the mask for the third time that night, no one had to know.

As they walked out, Mr. Stark’s arm around his shoulders, Peter said, “I just realized I never asked how you knew to come here.”

“You missed curfew, buddy, big time. Almost gave me a heart attack when I tracked the suit to the hospital, too. We’ll have to add that into the conversation we’ll be having later,” Mr. Stark said.

Peter couldn’t help but chuckle.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry the format was so awful when I first posted this. I've never posted on this site before and frankly what the fuck. Where are my italics


End file.
